I'm new and stoked to death about the existence of handmade hero. I'd been planning to do it for several months, but I wanted to get some C familiarity first (I'm a second year CS student and just got through the C/C++ course). So, I've now launched into it and... I'm immediately set off by the unexpectedly massive endeavor that is the setup (days 1-25).
So, my question is, is there shame in just, holding off on this for now, taking Casey's source from day 26 or whenever the non-platform work starts, and coming back to this at a later time? I want to work on the design coding of it: planning and implementing; I feel like this can wait. Not to mention I'd kind of rather be on Linux to begin with. I saw the Handmade Penguin guide, and might do that.
Will I miss out on significant background? I'm on day 12 now but with only maybe 30-40% comprehension thus far. And maybe the bigger, scarier question: am I overly optimistic that this gets less scary once we're into working engine architecture?
Watch the videos in order, the thing is a lot of it wont make sense, it's a MASSIVE undertaking. You are going to be really confused, and the thing is if you sit there and try to understand every single detail you will get burnt out, my advice is on each day just try to tinker with the code at the end, and don't try to cram multiple videos per day, I'd cap it at two and then practice.
I would say overall that yes, you will miss a ton of stuff because of the sheer amount of content that gets covered per video, and each video seems to have something very important for later on as well so overall I'd say yes; even if you don't get it push through the setup, you'll at least understand SOME of it. Best of luck :)
It's probably safe to skip ahead to the end of the platform stuff, since even though there will often be references to it, the majority of the work is on game-specific structures. However, he does flip back to the platform layer occasionally to add things, and knowing how to interoperate with an OS is important, so I do recommend you go back at some point and see how it's done.
tl;dr: It won't kill your progress, but you might be a little confused. It's a valid choice.
I think I'm just gonna set a goal of Lecture 80 by end of January and approach it in a sort of non-linear way, coming back to platform at the end. I'm just not as experienced at C as I'd estimate most people successfully doing this are, and I wanna throw myself into practicing that: there's kind of a problem I have with the windows stuff where I couldn't ever come to a solution on my own because I just don't perfectly understand the problem in the first place. But I have a decent math background and familiarity with Unity and sprites and the like, and so the later episodes (from what I've seen, skipping around in the last few days) I could probably at times pause and work ahead to really engage with the answer Casey gives when I turn the video back on.